Soul Spinning

Vats

I found myself wandering the basement of basements in the Parkersburg, Lewiston and Meadville American Viscose plants, large vats of raw viscose  waiting to be spun up to make the nitro-cellulous and saponified. thread.

 It was cool and dark in this underground underpass, the first word I spoke in first grade. There was never anybody there. Then, where the world went wrong and could not be set right, we found ourselves like birds before a storm in an age that lost its history and fell into bondage of the masses. The only reality the individual could reclaim was himself, a last basis on which reality could appear. Existence is above all else a personal reality in trials. As faith that had no future, for its past was destroyed, honesty was left as the only indispensable condition that the world might be true. That God revealed himself in a convicted criminal in this world of poverty, in lowliness, and complete renunciation, in the most absolute dissimilarity from nobility, contradicting kings and queens and all fallen angel powers, through a complete reversal in consciousness, the individual after the second birth sees that preceding life was not  properly existence at all. Complete surrender of understanding against reason, this Appearance reveals its humiliation! Faith outside and opposed to human truth, which is merely world culture created by nephilim to celebrate themselves and subvert,. We are not asleep within to be reawakened, we are dead and needed to be deceived anew in an age when literal reality was rejected. Generations of teachers have taken up this counterfeit reality with its outlandish promises of wisdom, immortality and gold all to merchandise the soul, and by corporate science in labs, re-baptized you know. Evil had stopped being absurd, scandalous and  beyond reason.

 Bless thou the LORD oh my soul and all that is within me bless his holy name. This is the place before you go and after the escape. No need press faces against windows, on panes. Your reflection is in other faces that pass, carrying what they can into the beyond. He actually carries John Gower's Voice of One Crying, as if description warms the difference between the smells and sounds of the crowds shuffling. Is he alone as the ear that hears, no passengers or refugees yet, before the fact, if you like to put it so? If you don't know what this means it explains his pocket Gower, filled with apprehension I shall sing of true dreams whose import disturbs the depths of my heart. May he whom the Isle of Patmos received in Apocalypse, and whose name I bear, guide this work. So tell o muse, unstaunched in the solitude, unstaunched and luminous, what has been promised these thousands of years, return of world without end, with end, not told from above but from a stand in the eyes and hands and a beating heart, entertainment for Father and Son, and the sons, that root in the home that melts in compassion for their state. Blessed is the man with four letters, aleph, lamed...Eliyahu had no desk except the count books, books and plants to grow monarchs from chrysalis, check the progress of the sycamore for carpenter bees, black buzzers that inhabit the cracks, where tortoise and Gambel quail take refuge.The vats were huge, thirty, forty feet tall remembrances of eternity in time. Attracted by the stillness, implicit being and power, they meant instruction and the compulsion of patterns mediated through time, held open by belief. Sheets of purified cellulose steeped in caustic soda, dried, shredded into crumbs, aged in metal containers. What's going on in and around the vats in me as it is among the sons of God whose election was before, but unknown. Poetic repetition seeks the mediated vision of the fathers, the recovery of origins before, as though prior instruction.The closer he gets, the further he is away it seems, but then also, the further he has come.

Viscose fibers are manufactured to create the illusion of the world. As he stands beside the tanks there is nothing but being, Dinglichkeit, thingness, materiality alone, which is a magnificent state, but without cognition. But the vats are metaphors of the stuff that makes the world, the explosive gasoline of the world fiber that is made to burn. Ezekiel says after they gave their jewels, their gold and silver and made them into images of men, sacrificed their oil and flour and honey, crowns, earrings, their incense to it, they gave their children and burned them in oblation to the gods. The vats are metaphors of the stuff that makes the world, but the world is false, it is a synthetic not a natural, which is what the man wears who leads into and sees all these things, dressed in pure linen.

 I am your sign, so that as I have done so shall it be done to all. But there are wheels within wheels. Kierkegaard asked for one favor from the gods, chose for himself laughter and they all began to laugh. That's his telling. The essential thing posits an opposition between inner and outer that makes its representation impossible when the effect of every vision is evident, full of eyes round about. To have laughter on one's side for this Elijah, native to the setting, was either all joke, humor of high and middle kinds, or elección. Yet shall he not see it. We won't know until the vote is in. To laugh seems hard wired on the foreheads of men that sigh and cry, as if they looked through a hole in the wall. Never say truth without a caveat, not Orphic ambiguity, but tease truth a season. The spirit rats will have a hard time getting their tails out of that.  What rats? For I know the things that come into your mind, every one of them. Call it humor because the first thing I read in Either/Or at the end of my own diaspora, when I picked it up again after 40 years, was Kierkegaard's paragraph at end of the Diapsalmata about his audience with the gods in the seventh heaven. Never start at the beginning, just open at random and begin. Prepare stuff for removing. Dig through the wall. If you want in on it just laugh along.


Of course I had been jacked out of that Foundry life of oil rigs and fires and train wrecks among the strip mined hills and all its social situations they might imply from the age of five, into an all new circumstance where this Elijah and ground of being plopped right atop and sank to the marrow. It had come right down out the sky and settled on my shoulders before, that I did not ever want to kill. That vision was the first in the outer world. I did not open my eyes to others. I saved opening, or was saved until the moment prepared to receive him, for Jesus, the Blessed, the only eternal man. People shake heads at the idea of the only true man. They have not felt it. Evangelicals worry they will not be taken. The fear of not being taken could not compete with the real horrors I knew before 16 On the Way Out of Sheol. It's a question of magnitude. What do I care about Rapture when carnivals, bordellos, bars, seductions, fights, appalling challenges, and huge literal giants wanted me?  It was said they didn't like the way I walked. You don't think children are going such places. You don't think the underbelly is hid everywhere in the societal middle class fat, that these lurk in your neighbor, leaders, institutions.

My first specific job after the white light was a white collar job at Merrill Lynch when all transactions were posted by hand, if you can believe it. That fellow was happily monitored by superiors in the "cage" so did not ruin too many trades with his bookkeeping. The chief memory of that is coming to work in downtown Philadelphia before eight in the morning, up the train station steps with the commuters and wandering at lunch around bookstores off Market and Chestnut streets handling versions of Kierkegaard, what else, continuing to puzzle whatever it is that puzzled them.

In the second so-called white collar job,

I found myself at all hours wandering through these plants on no particular assignment, as if it were a cave. I would get caught up in the spinning rooms, large warehouse sized rooms filled with rows and rows of spinners that spun the rayon out of sulphuric acid baths to the clack, clack, clacking sound of the spinners, the smell of the acid and an acid mist that hung over it all. The viscose solution forced through a spinnerets from a scaled-up version of a butter churn turns them into strings of fibers. The acid coagulates and solidifies the filaments, called regenerated cellulose filaments. They called it jet spun, emitting zinc and hydrogen sulfide.The filaments are passed through rollers and wound on spools, washed, bleached, rinsed, dried, and wound again. This acetate was pretty far from dipping a needle in a viscous solution of mulberry pulp and gummy rubber, as it all began. The early product called Chardonnay would burn like gasoline.

When you get to the spinning rooms, as the correspondence goes, all kinds of formats and forms appear. Whether you should believe rayon that goes up in flames or not, I take it as an species of Christian atheism, the kind so called that declaims that all the gods are frauds. Name a god and it is a fraud, but there is therefore only one, known as Yahweh, Yah Yahweh, and all the rest are presumptive idols, admittedly of much attraction if they could get men to kill their children in front of them and debase themselves in sheer materiality of being only. The Christian atheist would speak like Abraham, Daniel, Job, Noah, you know the list goes on, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Elijah, and overthrow these impostors. I suppose that's not a synthetic fiber at all, but pure linen.

Rayon from Cellulose means wood fiber of course,  wood chips, spruce or pine, bleached with sodium hypochloride (NaOCl) to remove color, soaked in 18% caustic soda for 1 to 2 hours producing sheets of alkali cellulose broken up into crumbs aged for some days, changed into cellulose xanthate by addition of liquid carbon disulfide, then dissolved in a weak solution of caustic soda and made into honey-like viscose. This is then pumped through spinnerets into a bath of sulfuric acid that "regenerates" the cellulose fiber. It is called viscose to describe the liquid state of the spinning solution. As a regeneration of wood it is a perfect metaphor for the spinning of souls. In Pot Spinning, after the acid bath the filaments are stretched on a series of offsetting rollers called godet wheels. This stretching reduces the diameter of the filaments and makes them uniform in size, and gives the filaments strength. The filaments  then go into a rapidly spinning cylinder called a Topham Box, resulting in cake-like strings that stick to the sides of the Topham Box. The strings are then washed, bleached, rinsed, dried, and wound in spools.In these trips to these plants we, meaning myself, and two or three full time auditors, would stay at hotels in the area. I remember sitting in the bars of these places with coffee, writing whatever it is I tried to write then, something of the alienation of life, the longing for intimacy, anything but to sit cooped up in a room.

The experiences in four American Viscose plants in 1962 stands behind much of my concept of the making, the spinning, the incarnation of word souls. I audited plants in Parkersburg, Lewiston, Meadville and Marcus Hook, a very odd thing, for This has to be how the souls were spun in brave new world I thought before I reread it, but it certainly was the notion behind Transporten Norton. It was humbling too, for the previous years I had worked in factories as a worker and been treated with no respect, but here I had a tie and part of the job was auditing the work force, so at one point I was handing out checks to employees to see if they were real people. All these men came with their wizened faces and dirty overalls calling me sir. It was as disturbing as when the next year I found myself in San Jose and was called Don Andres. For that event  go to Sky Shadows for the pics and follow the link at the top for the article.

See Viscose Rayon.
Pics from Plastics Historical Society, The Manufacturing Process for Viscose Rayon
See also: http://www.parkersburgviscose.com/viscose_plants.html
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Individuals yes, associated with human heroes, not divine, as the Greeks, but Noah, Daniel and Job, and all the major English writers Herbert, Hopkins, Donne, had a history not only in my family but as individuals who stand against the civilizations of the world. That question in Philosophical Fragments (1844) asks whether an historical point of departure is possible for an eternal consciousness. The longer one lives the more history grows wide, but the eternal stays the same. And here I make my confession, remembered inaccurately as the elder serve the younger, but apropos of all of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous text, words spoken as ventriloquists, psychological experiments made with the consciousness of pseudonymity or polynymity, in which the written is surely mine but only to the extent that I have put into the mouth the words of the individual who produced him, this autobiograph, first person third person, came to look at Kierkegaard as an attempt to refute him. At the time, if correct, this predated all the basement readings of Postscript. Alex O. served on the board of Kings College, undergoing a challenge to its rules by the neo-orths, which heresy, was attributed to K. I volunteered to examine this, and saw the great leap, the father's yelp and on and presented notes for that next board meeting to refute the K! But the only refutation of Kierkegaard is himself, a constant, which might be said of them all, for he had many psuedonyms. You could say he was a polymath of pseudonymity, fueling his energy with the sublimate created with his notions of love that made him deny love to fulfill it, turn a woman into a concept of the highest denigration possible, for a a woman is to be loved above all else. He's not alone in this, Mackey cites Wilde that "there is only one real tragedy in a woman's life, The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband." This from one who was the opposite of a lover of his wife. I considered this all part of K's fraud and dishonest. Since when does a fraud fuel an artist's work? These two, love and honesty about which he wrote the most, he lives the least. Bly! The Shadow! Because Regina couldn't undertake doubt he must spin himself a seduction. Kafka used to weekly visit courtesans in Prague in his youth. You think this has anything to do with his inability to marry? Artificial silk resists moisture and can be dyed the most garish colors.

A chow-chow is my analyst

In her first therapy of the sou Freud's chow-chow saw through the surface, not that one face lay inside the other, but a special eye saw beneath, and cared. The chow nature like the cat can see, and care. Any inquiry into the cause of sorrow however will be met with antagonism, a bite to cover the pain, and thereafter seeking to remember, it will test witnesses, interrogate a hundred souls. The outer expression of sorrow removed, the inner detected by looking through the facade remains, but there is nothing of the present in the past, "not joy," says K, "for that is always present" and earth.
How could it not be, for joy fills sky.  "So individuals with exteriors as firm as a rock have safeguarded an eternally hidden life of sorrow," * sorrows spun in many men's asexual lives tainted against the women who made them: Kierkegaard made a fetish of seduction,  Freud  stopped marital relations in 1895, Ruskin fled the sight of his wife on their wedding night. Just to prove that  modern extremes have precedent, millions of men have been poisoned by synthetic testosterone and growth hormones in meat and milk.  Why is the entrance to life so shunned and what has this to do with the tripppling of the world in a lifetime? As if they did not want to  be born, and sought to demote themselves, their mothers, wives and all women pushed into mythic degradation? The inner is visible from the outside if seen. Only the most careful observer can expect to reveal reflective sorrow.

* Adapted from Shadowgraphs. Either/Or, Kierkagaard, tr. Hannay, 175.

John Gower

I try to understand. The wheels have left the ground. When the car speeds down fast enough it will plane out into air because a cross road cut into the side of the hill serves as a launching pad and the light is green.   Conshohocken in Bala Cynwyd is that way down to Levering Mill Circle. Not quite while the car was in the air that May, though it might have been, she wanted to know my middle name. It's Elijah! I said. Don't ask a 17 year old such questions. She was getting "to know" me, but what does it matter in the end? I was within bare weeks, unbeknownst, of being struck, lit up for all the world to see, lightning transformed, changed. You see what a  job I have made it, but now to look on the inside what used to appear without, and look on the outside and see what I used to seem within goes along with Elijah's meaning, El is Yah, versus its opposite in Joel that means Yah is El.

Yes, I am trying to deceive you into being a Christian when you cannot be and God appeared to the world in the person of Jesus the Messiah in opposition to all human truth. How can I deceive you? I was overtaken, snuck up on, but far from resisting the best of the best. Later I resisted, taken upon the way, but the diaspora was incomplete, interrupted, rescued from al Qaeda. The most interesting thing is how the memory plunges into change, not just remembering the times or results but the actual events. I plunge everything experienced into the eternity of remembrance, everything finite and contingent is forgotten and erased. The short of it is that at 17, going down that hill, shortly after, I embraced the thing Kierkegaard desired the most, the thing Kafka read K to find out, and what Borges found at the end, in Geneva, the transparent ground of being promised in the True Light, that lights everyone who comes into the world. I finally found it out to say, riveted there, as my eyes watched the high heels of women on the streets flap up and down as they walked, hips and booty swinging, bare arms reflecting the neon signs in the smell of buses idling their diesel engines.

You can say, it gave a point of view, transported to the first heaven, Chestnut St. No gods but buses and trains sat in this assembly. And then I went to second heaven, the Tesla library basement, with its complete collection of all Kierkegaard in all languages and editions where I wandered continually those years as if it were a supermarket of goods arrayed to draw further to where the really big money spends. Returning, it was as pleasant to stand in the silence with Concluding Unscientific Postscript as it was beside the vats, leaning against the stacks, understanding nothing. Neither was I accorded the favor of a wish, as Kierkegaard in Either/Or, but a series of circumstances like riding the rapids of a river from which you cannot or would not extricate yourself is enjoyable as designated. I only had to choose one thing as the currents swirled and I was jacked out of one life into another, which beginning came in response to that question, a mutual attraction. I knelt before the Blessed One. This is not theory. Forces unmask themselves to children, and the children keep silent. If they speak it is doubted. Who's going to believe a child against a priest, adult, a cop? Children hold the notion they are powerful anyway. Amnesia sets in and endorphins kick, and one goes on, right? "Because, because." Woody Guthrie. Here's A Sense of Reality. So with this wind at my back it was pure salvation to embrace the Blessed One, which brought a change of nature and all intellect and higher training that emerged. I'd hate to have to pay for it, the literal exchange of natures  before the beginning, a shadow of what preoccupied after. Maybe from reading the books of the martyrs and the New Testament where the only outcome is death by a hundred means as Hebrews 11. Let me never, never, outlive my love to thee, says the Sacred Head. Saved From the End of the World, it doesn't do justice to a 17 year old to tell him he's part of the old dying god syndrome and that Osiris started it. Counterfeits. There is only One true. Sure my Mennonite background could be called to account, but before, it was the fear, betrayals, and angers of demons against children that made me run to the Word that never stops flowing, to as many as received him--to them gave he the power. Now the world is afraid of the child.

O wheel roll on was a plea from a loved one who had a 70% blockage of the left ventral heart artery, who asked whether he should have a stent installed. How should I know? I meditated that and sought counsel from the True Light. Was sitting in the hot tub some days later where I train, oblivious, when a swim teacher came over and ensued discussing what happened to Ginger to the one other person in the tub -- I like to be there when it's empty so had waited till just one remained. This resulted in her delivering sotto voce, as though by script, that Ginger had had a stent put in, but didn't need it, and she should have gotten a second opinion! Which is exactly what transpired. I take it as a big joke that this Intelligence sees fit to communicate with me this way, with a dumb show, not to speak of all the precognitions received, therefore known before. Take the examples at Today If You Would Hear and laugh! And there is of course the glasses!

Whatever arguments about properties in review, genre shrinking, Buckminster Fuller’s idea of miracles, mine, belief in God, pattern matching, what prayer might do, what is remembered, what forgotten, the glasses were in two pieces, the whole beach wiped out by the waves. Just one side of a buried lens caught the sun and flashed in my eye. Our daughter couldn’t see anything without them. Then after a while one of the kids found the rest of the frame and the other lens buried some distance off. Prayer enabled a belief that they could be found, which seemed impossible, so we looked. So prayer enables you to look for the impossible, and faith is the will to believe the glasses can be found? To prove their finding not a probability, but a certainty caused by prayer, not based on selecting cases to prove the point, seems like that would require proving prayer changes the probability of events. Would such a successful experiment convince a skeptic that prayer is real and it works, that prayer is larger than probability?

 I am wearing a heavy shirt, a large eagle lands on my shoulder. A smaller female lands in my lap. A profusion of eagles found the carcass gathering. A baby eaglet snuggled into my fur as if to the manner born, the mother preening it the while, the father perched with claws next to my neck, a look out, as we four sit to begin our wait. Each person, a fact unwritten, burns in cognition before the text, warning, as if those as St John, heard a cappella, Kyrie Elieson under the casement, emaciates come to call, each point of light swimming underwater with a blessing.

This Post scientific postscript is Post scientific since science became science fiction, what with artificial intelligence and singularity etc, which entry see here, but take this as Kierkegaard's correction of the human, now lost to artifice and manufactured souls that Blake predicted, the crux of the superman:

"Could you wish that that beautiful law which for thousands of years has borne the human race and every generation of the race through life, that beautiful law, more glorious than that which keeps the stars in their courses across the vault of heaven, could you wish that law breached--more dreadful than if the law of Nature lost its force and everything was dissolved in terrible chaos?"  

Either/Or, end of The Edifying.

Some shock to think the process of birth is tampered with, population of the world tripled since 1927.  Obesity rates tripled. Taken for granted, honed with platitudes, we need not ask as if it were a puppy mill. Just because life goes on as we know it does not mean we know it. Between ourselves and consciousness and the world, what is it? You are going  to hear these trippplings concurrent with broadcast waves.

Of what use is any breeding in a belief system where the individual must rediscover the premises of life and commit to them alone, apart from history, society, even family? There are blessings that accrue to the child of a family of faith, but they do not substitute for faith. Baptism does not save nor any outer act, even money. That is the bane and blessing of all lines. Most of the descendants of David in the royal line betrayed the premises in which his people flourished. So among the chosen and the exception occurs the greatest betrayal.

First off we have been born. The immediate memories of the mother are passed on to the  child. That begins our life and before that there was nothing known, but as the child grows its nature begins to assert itself and the memories of the mother are its first conditioning. You can know this yourself from your own mother and from her mother, and from your grandmother. All others are second hand. The memories you know are felt not remembered. Those transmitted become part of the fabric of the mind more than air and sun.

After the mother, the child is surrounded by a dark not understood. Childhood prayers mediate the dark, but the child also knows more sight and sound than the calloused grown self. We wrestle with or are blessed with these memories all our lives. As a people, as a world this is given and only much later are we aware of anything else. You cannot know the nature of the individual child any more than you can know your own, so don't think you can. It is revealed by time and acts, but still is not known. It can go a lot of different ways no matter what we intend as parents or children. It's not about value formation as they like to say either. It's about inner change.

The reason we live in cities and not towns isn't because of the libraries, but because nobody knows us and we want it that way. The whole structure of town, lifelong with people we grew up with we avoid. We are all in flight from them, emigres to the unknown, into anonymity if not pseudonymity. But if we did so live our memories are full of the towns, bully. Going back to a small town is like returning to a war, all ptsd, people who compromised the soul. See Nebraska.